Is it possible to ‘live in this moment’ when you know the floor creaking under your feet has felt everything from bare feet to boots moving over it for more than a hundred years? Sometimes that knowledge can even make the room feel rather crowded...but then this IS a Living Ghost Town....

This one experience influenced the next chapter of my life. That very day, I decided to develop a new program called “Saving The Ancients” under our environmental education non-profit, The SummerTree Institute. I ended up chasing bulldozers to salvage the trunks of as many desert plants as possible, had them sliced, sanded, and polished so ecology students could help us count the annual growth rings of as many sizes and species of native plants as we could find.